Chaco (Other Keyword)

1-25 (388 Records)

The Archaeology of Aztec North (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle I. Turner. Ruth Van Dyke.

Our paper reports on our recent archaeological testing at the previously unexcavated Aztec North great house at Aztec Ruins National Monument. Standing on the river terrace behind and above the better-known valley great houses, Aztec North is out of sight of those great houses but tightly bound to them as part of the formalized cultural landscape of Aztec Ruins. It is a crucial site for understanding the development of Chaco Canyon’s outliers, as it was likely the earliest great house built in...


Architectural Wood Use in Chaco Kivas (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Lekson. Erin Baxter. Catherine Cameron.

The architecture of Chacoan kivas was markedly unlike far more numerous non-Chacoan kivas. While Chaco is famous for its stone masonry, we focus here on wood use, and specifically on radial beam pilasters and wainscoting. Both are enigmatic and, consequently, both have often been overlooked during excavation and sometimes even removed in modern stabilization. But when the kivas were in use these features would have been dominant, eye-level aspects of kiva interiors. Using examples from Chaco...


Aztec Ruins, 2.0 (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Baxter.

This poster will present a "new" view of Aztec Ruins -- particularly Aztec West -- which refines modern base maps with historic data. This latter includes data drawn from Morris-era excavation photos, as well as additional information from unpublished sketch maps, correspondence, and field notes. This 'new' map will include unpublished locational data on mounds, burials, floor features, wall features, remodeling, refuse, burning... etc etc. Almost no reading required. SAA 2015 abstracts made...


Chaco and Hopewell: Redefining Interaction Spheres through Multiscalar Network Approaches (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Mills. Alice Wright.

Chaco and Hopewell are two of the most well studied archaeological regions in North America. Although Chaco is often compared to Cahokia, comparison to Hopewell brings out important ways in which extensive regional connectivities were formed through the intersection of religious, political, and economic networks. Both societies show evidence of periodic, eventful monumental construction; spatial connectivity through roads/causeways; long-distance procurement of materials; production and...


Chacoan Heights at Aztec Ruins (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle I. Turner.

At the Chacoan outlier of Aztec Ruins in northern New Mexico, the unexcavated Aztec North great house is located on top of a river terrace overlooking the broad Animas River valley. Down below, but out of sight from Aztec North, are two other great houses. The builders of these three great houses enmeshed them in a planned cultural landscape that reflects their cosmology and that intentionally reproduces a portion of the landscape at Chaco Canyon. Aztec North differs from its fellow great houses...


Chacoan Roads and Landscape Archaeology in the Eastern Red Mesa Valley, New Mexico (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Schaefer. Kathryn Turney. Aliceia Schubert. Deborah Huntley. Haley Wilkerson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chacoan culture is well known for its examples of communal building projects and monumental architecture. Chacoan roads, apart from great houses, are perhaps the most well-known yet enigmatic examples of such. In the Red Mesa Valley of Western New Mexico, we examine how several newly identified road segments manifest themselves on the landscape as well as...


Clear Views from the Ground: 3D Modeling of Architecture and Rock Art from Chaco to Anguilla (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow. Patricia Crown. John Crock.

Airborne LiDAR and orthophotography are increasingly ubiquitous in modern archaeological research, particularly at the regional scale. For detailed intrasite analyses of architectural sites, rockshelters, and caves, however, these airborne technologies offer limited utility. This paper highlights the significant research potential and conservation value of very high-resolution terrestrial LiDAR and gigapan HDR photogrammetry for architectural and "built" cultural dwelling places. Drawing on two...


Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan world
PROJECT Ruth Van Dyke.

These are the "robust" viewsheds as calculated for Ruth M. Van Dyke, R. Kyle Bocinsky, Tucker Robinson, and Thomas C. Windes, Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World, American Antiquity 81, pp. 205–230 (2016). The data include three files: A shapefile of site locations and site information; A Graph ML network file where nodes are the sites, and edges represent intervisibility between sites; and a zip file with viewsheds from each site. The viewsheds are...


An Investigation of Ancient Turkeys near Houck, Arizona (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Blythe Morrison.

This research explores microscale patterns of human-avian interaction in the prehispanic Southwest by identifying evidence of Meleagris gallopavo (turkey) use at a series of multicomponent sites near Houck, Arizona. Using legacy field notes, maps, photos, and artifacts housed at the Museum of Northern Arizona, I provide information about the spatiotemporal contexts of turkey remains at the Houck site cluster. The area of focus was primarily occupied between AD 800-1250, before and during the...


Local Visibility and Monumentality in the Chaco World: A Total Viewshed Approach (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Dungan. Sylviane Déderix. Barbara Mills. Kristin Safi. Devin White.

Chacoan great houses are considered "monumental," in the sense both of scale and of conveying meaning. Throughout the Chaco World, great houses and other large-scale buildings would have been associated to some degree with a larger, regional Chacoan ideology. At the same time, these structures vary and should be understood in the context of diverse local and regional histories. Visibility can be a key component of monumentality, and it has been suggested that great houses were frequently placed...


Out From the Center: Rock-Art of the Chaco World (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huang.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chaco Canyon contains multitudes of petroglyphs and pictographs, yet rock art has not been a prevalent line of evidence in the archaeological study of that pre-contact culture. More than 15,000 Ancestral Puebloan elements attest to the importance of the role of iconography within the canyon. And the...


Petroglyphs of East Tank Mesa and the Mac Stod Great House: Using Rock Art to Gauge Regional Influences in Petrified Forest National Park (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

East Tank Mesa is a prominent landform located within the new expansion lands of Petrified Forest National Park: harboring a high concentration of Pueblo II-Pueblo III petroglyph panels and one of the region’s few possible Chacoan outliers. This possible outlier is the Mac Stod site: a seven-room pueblo possessing some of the hallmarks of Chacoan architecture (core veneer masonry, large rooms, long straight walls, and well constructed rectangular doorways). The nature of Mac Stod, and whether it...


Recent Investigations of the Los Rayos – Red Willow Chacoan Landscape (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only James Potter. Dennis Gilpin. Dean Wilson. Mike Mirro.

This is an abstract from the "The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Los Rayos-Red Willow Chacoan landscape, east of Tohatchi, New Mexico, consists of the Los Rayos great kiva and at least seven surrounding small-house sites, the Red Willow Chacoan great house and associated great kiva and at least seven surrounding small-house sites, and a...


Sandals from the Center Place, Footprints on the Pots: Continuity and Change in Twined Sandal Tread Designs from Chaco, Aztec, and Beyond (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Bellorado.

Twined sandals were important components of Ancestral Pueblo ritual paraphernalia for a millennium. They were expensive and time consuming to make and many had patterns of raised knots woven into their treads that stamped footprints with complex geometric designs on the ground when worn. Scholars have postulated that twined sandals were likely used in communal rituals, dance performances, and even foot races. During the Pueblo II period, their use appears to have been connected with communal...


Site location and metadata from: Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan world (2016)
DOCUMENT Full-Text Kyle Bocinsky.

These are the site location and metadata used in: Ruth M. Van Dyke, R. Kyle Bocinsky, Tucker Robinson, and Thomas C. Windes, Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World, American Antiquity 81, pp. 205–230 (2016). See other datasets in this project for site viewsheds and the viewnets between sites. The data are in the GeoJSON format, and link to the other files in this project using the "UNIQUE_ID" field. The file should be readable by most modern GIS...


Social Networks and the Scale of the Chaco World (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Peeples. Barbara Mills. Jeffery Clark. Benjamin Bellorado. Thomas Windes.

Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico has long been recognized as an important regional center characterized by impressive architecture and wide-spread influence across the Ancestral Puebloan region (ca. A.D. 800-1150+). Although few researchers dispute the strong similarities in construction styles and techniques most often used to track Chacoan influence, there is little agreement on what such similarities mean in terms of social, political, or economic relationships. In this paper, we...


Surface Archaeology as Site Assessment: The Haynie Site and the Northern Chaco Outliers Project (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kari Schleher. Kate Hughes. Jamie Merewether. Michael Lorusso. Grant Coffey.

Crow Canyon Archaeological Center is beginning a multi-year project at the Haynie site, a Chaco outlier in the central Mesa Verde region of southwest Colorado. In 2016, the goal was to assess the spatial and temporal characteristics of Haynie through in-field analyses of pottery and chipped-stone artifacts from the surface. This was done via systematic dog-leash collection units placed across the site, as well as judgmental analysis of artifacts in disturbed contexts. Through analyses of...


Tom Windes: Celebrating 40 Years of Innovative Research on the Colorado Plateau. (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Cory Breternitz.

Tom Windes has been a leader of innovative research on the Colorado Plateau for over four decades. His early work as the archaeologist on the Manti-LaSalle National Forest in southern Utah lead to one of the first pot hunting prosecutions under ARPA. His Forest Service career was followed by work with the Zuni Tribe and then nearly three decades of association with the National Park Service’s Chaco Center. Tom has become synonymous with all things Chaco, serving as Project Director for the Chaco...


Toward a Dynamic Geospatial Model of Shifting Hydrologic Regimes and Agricultural Potential at Chaco Canyon: Report from the Field (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow.

This paper summarizes objectives, strategies and preliminary findings of ongoing research at Chaco Canyon led by the University of New Mexico and the Puente Institute, and funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper focuses on the use of advanced geospatial technologies for field data collection, analysis, and visualization. Project datasets to be discussed include airborne and terrestrial lidar, stereo panoramic photogrammetry, kite/balloon mapping, GIS-based full-motion video,...


Tracing the Growth of Historic Preservation in the U.S. and the Arc of Tom Windes’s Career (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Wilshusen. Mark Tobias.

The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966 and the conferring of Tom Windes’s M.A. in Anthropology in 1967 appear to be causally independent, but thereafter the arc of historic preservation and Windes’s archaeological career are intertwined. We distinguish three major stages in cultural resource management over the last 50 years, each of which tracks almost seamlessly with the changing focus of Windes’s work. The challenges of defining the intent of the act, enforcing...


Viewnet data from: Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan world (2016)
DOCUMENT Full-Text R. Kyle Bocinsky.

These are the site viewnet data used in: Ruth M. Van Dyke, R. Kyle Bocinsky, Tucker Robinson, and Thomas C. Windes, Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World, American Antiquity 81, pp. 205–230 (2016). See other datasets in this project for site data, locations, and viewsheds. The data are a network in the Graph Modeling Language (GML) format where nodes are the sites, and edges represent intervisibility between sites. The nodes are named using the...


Viewshed GeoTIFF for 10-Acre Ruin (2016)
GEOSPATIAL Kyle Bocinsky.

These are the "robust" viewsheds as calculated for Ruth M. Van Dyke, R. Kyle Bocinsky, Tucker Robinson, and Thomas C. Windes, Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World, American Antiquity 81, pp. 205–230 (2016).


Viewshed GeoTIFF for 29MC187 (2016)
GEOSPATIAL Kyle Bocinsky.

These are the "robust" viewsheds as calculated for Ruth M. Van Dyke, R. Kyle Bocinsky, Tucker Robinson, and Thomas C. Windes, Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World, American Antiquity 81, pp. 205–230 (2016).


Viewshed GeoTIFF for 29MC257 (2016)
GEOSPATIAL Kyle Bocinsky.

These are the "robust" viewsheds as calculated for Ruth M. Van Dyke, R. Kyle Bocinsky, Tucker Robinson, and Thomas C. Windes, Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World, American Antiquity 81, pp. 205–230 (2016).


Viewshed GeoTIFF for 29MC264 (2016)
GEOSPATIAL Kyle Bocinsky.

These are the "robust" viewsheds as calculated for Ruth M. Van Dyke, R. Kyle Bocinsky, Tucker Robinson, and Thomas C. Windes, Great houses, shrines, and high places: Intervisibility in the Chacoan World, American Antiquity 81, pp. 205–230 (2016).